The Reckoning

‘The Reckoning’ is quintessential Steve Tilston. It has insightful lyrics (reflecting an affinity with the landscape and the power of nature), a keen sense of history (with a nod to the potential of the future) and a sharp eye for social satire. Musically, he continues to show us why he is one of the UK’s most respected songwriters, continuing to create gorgeous melodies, in a series of musical contexts powerfully evocative of time and place.

It’s Spring and the air is full of birdsong, natural voices from across the globe, sounding exotic and yet totally belonging. It’s an apt aural image for this album.

We travel from Pennine hills to Spain’s El Chorro Pass, to the Indian Ganges’ side, and to Nottamun Town precisely re-imagined as London in Spring 2011.

That song, a piece of precise social satire, is a reckoning. Other songs sum up Steve’s individual view of the power of nature, the presence of the past or the potential of the future. The only guitar you hear throughout is Steve’s, played live without overdubs – next time we meet I really must count his fingers!

Two instrumentals demonstrate why Steve’s playing is held in such high regard: one is a set of dance tunes, while the curiously entitled Ijna, an evocation of the aureate spirit of creativity and a tribute to the guitarist without whom…etc: a Golden Graham, indeed.

At the heart of the album is the epic Memory Lane: even more than the album’s title track, this is the song that addresses the Reckoning, a past tense encountered not with sentimental nostalgia but with a startled recognition. Incisive and insightful, detailed and wide-ranging, from its tender aubade of optimism to its concluding nocturne for a lost hero, this is quintessential Tilston.

Insomnia can have its ‘upsides’. I’ve baked a few loaves and started a few songs in the wee hours and in that respect, this one is pretty time specific. I have to add that, in the cold light of day, the bread has had the edge over most of the songs, but this one seemed to rise nicely above the rest. Living in the Pennine hills, over a thousand feet above sea level, I get to see some stirring sunsets and sunrises and this is in praise of one such dawn and the promise of a new day. The dawn chorus that accompanies the instrumental ending is supplied by local Yorkshire birds.

A rewrite of one of my favourite traditional songs. The original is, on the face of it, a nonsense song which hints at sedition not far below the surface. Probably when it was written, sedition was a capital offence, so in these supposedly more enlightened times, I have the luxury of allowing this one to foam and seethe nearer the surface.

I’m not overfond of the term, but this one drips ‘baby boomer guilt,’ and I do care about the legacy we leave future generations. They say that nuclear waste remains radioactive for over five thousand years. Five thousand years ago was the Bronze Age and they were just starting to build the pyramids in Egypt. In my view it’s a long old time to leave something so toxic hanging around, particularly when no one seems to have a clue where to stash it.

I have not walked the whole of the Pennine way, just parts of it and some parts several times. Most days I like to get up on the tops and have a wander. I can go straight from my back garden up onto the moors and it’s become such an essential part of my existence. I have favourite rock outcrops that I sit on and watch the hills roll off into the distance and sometimes I remember to take a flask and a sandwich…it’s a small island, but up there it appears like a big country to me.

Lately, by accident more than design, I’ve found myself near places I used to live and loiter in and have been compelled to go and visit them, almost as if to stake some spurious historic claim. Some have been obliterated by progress, some changed beyond recognition and, quite a number, hardly changed at all, but always the floodgates open and the memories come rushing back. Also, lately, old friends from school and childhood have made contact and inevitably the conversation leads to those who are no longer with us. There are one or two ghosts down on Memory Lane.

A song with an eastern flavour, in praise of the moon, particularly when full and reflected in the waves.

8 Doubting Thomas 4:34Steve Tilston – Guitar/Vocals

Thomas really is my middle name and as the song suggests I have no answers to the great big question and feel that I cannot connect with anything approaching blind faith. You could say I’m a sceptical agnostic with atheistic tendencies, but given to occasional flights of spiritual fancy. As someone once said, ‘It’s not that I don’t believe in the possibility of a God, it’s just that there’s insufficient evidence!’

9 Davy Lamp/Fruit Fly 4:38Steve Tilston – Guitar

Two tunes written in traditional style, the first being a hornpipe after the playing of that great 19th century fiddler James Hill. This piece is dedicated to The Davy Lamp club in Washington Tyne & Wear. The second tune is a reel, dedicated to good cider.

A wonderful holiday in a villa perched on a cliff edge in Andalucia. The Rio de La Miel runs beside it into the Mediterranean. A short distance over the small ‘river of honey’ is an imposing old building that was once a paper mill and according to the woman who owns the villa, a place of internment and torture during the civil war. Her grandfather was a local guerilla leader known as ‘El Duende,’ and he was the thorn in the side of the fascist Captain whose troops occupied the paper mill. Apparently El Capitan was a fastidious man, both in his methods of torture and dietary habits, only ever consuming half the plate of food that the women of the nearby village prepared for him. The remainder of each his meals is then spirited away by the women, ostensibly to feed the herd of semi-feral pigs that rooted and snorted barely a stone’s throw away. Hiding in a cave behind these pigs was El Duende and it was he that had the benefit of the left overs, not the pigs. El Capitan was oblivious to the fact that he was feeding the very one he searched high and low for…he never did find El Duende.

11 Weeping Willow Replanted 4:02Steve Tilston – Guitar/Vocals

This is a substantial rewrite of an old Blind Boy Fuller blues. I’ve changed the words and the tune, but the bare bones of the guitar part are the same. The latter I learnt originally from Wizz Jones.

12 Ijna (Davy Ji) 4:51Steve Tilston – Guitar

This guitar instrumental, and playing out piece, pays homage to the late great Davy Graham. It intentionally has touches of his most famous composition Anji all over it. The main theme has an ascending bass line out of a minor chord, the reverse of the descending bass line of the original; hence the name Ijna, which apparently is the name of a Hindu spirit…could be fate, could be coincidence. Maybe Davy knows?